Airbnb Magazine, Spring 2018

NINE DAYS before his wife, Jessica, was due to give birth to their first daughter on December 28, Paris-based particle physicist Matt Nguyen squeezed in a secret day trip to Marseille, 466 miles away. On that ordinary Tuesday, when his wife assumed he was at work, Nguyen sought to photograph a red and yellow tile design inspired by the pixelated 1978 video game Space Invaders and plastered on a building on Rue Villeneuve. For his efforts, he would earn 50 points on the four-year-old FlashInvaders app, which awards gamers for finding mosaics scattered across the world. “I really shouldn’t have been a few hours away,” recalls the 39-year-old. “All I needed was for Jessica to call and be like, ‘It’s happening!’” While he was on the train, an electricity cable fell onto the track, setting him back two hours. When he finally rolled into the station, Nguyen — who is ranked number 11 on the app — hopped off and begged the ticket desk for an ­immediate return ticket so he could make it home for dinner. “I headed back to Paris without flashing anything. The trip was a complete failure.”